Tabrizi and Sharak (2010) studied an integrated basin solar still with a built-in sandy heat reservoir.

Integrated heat reservoir leads to significantly higher solar still productivity during nights and cloudy days. Figure 1 shows the schematic diagram of the solar still with built-in sandy reservoir as a storage medium. The basin area of the still is 0.41 m2, fabricated from a matte black painted galvanized iron sheet of thickness 0.3 cm leaving a gap under the horizontal portion of the basin liner. This gap (745712 cm3) was loaded with sand (=2.5 g/cm3), because of its low cost and large availability as a heat reservoir. The basin side surfaces and the entire heat reservoir body were isolated by the 4 cm thick layer of poly-urethane foam to reduce heat losses. The glass cover of the still is made up of 0.5 cm thick simple window glass with the tilt angle of 45 facing south. The experiments were carried out in 3 spring days from 8:30 A.M. till 10:30 P.M. The amount of distillated water, local wind velocity, and temperatures of different parts of the solar still were measured hourly. For precision, the glass cover temperature was measured at 12 nodes by copper-constantan thermocouples. In integrated basin solar still with sandy heat reservoir, heat reservoir affects caused water evaporation process even after sunset and resulted in a dramatic increase of water production in comparison with the conventional basin solar stills. About 12% of total daily production produced in 4 hour of experiment after the sunset. They showed that for a 14-hour experiment, the still productivity was about 3000 cm3/m2 (basin area is 0.41m2) as shown in Fig. 3. This demonstrates more than 75% increase in the still productivity in comparison with conventional basin solar still without heat reservoir.

Fig. 1. A schematic drawing of the experimental set-up. (Tabrizi and Sharak (2010))

Fig. 2. Temperature variation of different elements of the still. (Tabrizi and Sharak (2010))

Fig. 3. Cumulative fresh water production during the experiment days. (Tabrizi and Sharak (2010))